Quotes from Lorrie Moore

A story is a kind of biopsy of human life. A story is both local, specific, small, and deep, in a kind of penetrating, layered, and revealing way.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.

I've had nonstop financial problems my whole adult life. It's always been a constant balance, year to year: 'Where's the time? Where's the money?'

Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.

Writing has to be an obsession - it's only for those who say, 'I'm not going to do anything else.'

Nabokov's adventures in language and style and naked braininess are really unparalleled.

Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.

I just don't want you to feel uncomfortable about this," he says. Say: "Hey. I am a very cool person. I am tough." Show him your bicep.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

All the world's a stage we're going through.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery.

I count too heavily on birthdays, though I know I shouldn't. Inevitably I begin to assess my life by them, figure out how I'm doing by how many people remember; it's like the old fantasy of attending your own funeral: You get to see who your friends are, get to see who shows up.

When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with...

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.

Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn't a big boom sound.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth... People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane.

Love drains you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.

You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy.

Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.